


Be Free

by hmweasley



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Muggle, Intersex, Intersex Teddy Lupin, King Cornelius Fudge, Misgendering, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Teddy Lupin, Other, Prejudice Against Intersex People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:07:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24780562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hmweasley/pseuds/hmweasley
Summary: When Teddy is caught stealing a loaf of bread from the market owned by the richest man in the kingdom, they know there will be consequences.
Relationships: Teddy Lupin/Victoire Weasley
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Be Free

**Author's Note:**

> Well, we all know why I'm going this. For the rest of June and July (at least) I'm setting a personal challenge to myself that everything I write will have a character that's explicitly stated to be trans in the story. This is technically the second one I've posted, though the first was a Shadowhunters fic.
> 
> Thank you to AJ and Ashleigh for beta reading this.
> 
> Also, if you still want to sign up for [Expelli-gender](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/expelligender_2020/profile), which is an exchange centered on writing trans characters in Harry Potter fanfiction, there's still a bit of time to sign up.
> 
> Prompts:  
> Write about someone who is a thief, merchant, or orator.  
> trapped and free

The sights and sounds of the marketplace overwhelmed Teddy’s ears. There were more goods than any one person—or even a family of a hundred—could ever need. Stalls upon stalls lined the streets, but this market wasn’t like the other, smaller marketplaces scattered across the city. No, this one was owned by one man, the richest in the kingdom aside from the king.

Spices tingled Teddy’s nose as they walked. Most of what the salespeople had laid out at their stalls were unfamiliar to Teddy, but they could imagine the tingling on their tongue if they’d eaten them before. Their stomach growled as a reminder of why they had come to the marketplace that had always scared them away before.

They didn’t need expensive spices; they needed sustenance.

Lucius Malfoy, the owner of the market, was some kind of relative of Teddy’s according to their long-since-dead grandmother. That was all that Teddy had been told about the man. They didn’t even understand what the connection actually was, but knowing it existed—that someone could be so rich when his own relatives were starving—was enough to drive Teddy forward while they pushed potential consequences from his mind.

Teddy’s fingers trailed over expensive cloth as they passed a stall. It felt incredible beneath their fingertips, but they pushed forward. You couldn’t eat cloth.

Their family had gotten by in the past, but that year’s famine was hitting everyone, even those who typically had a little left over, and Teddy’s own family couldn’t get by with their usual means. Teddy pressed a hand over their stomach as it growled to stifle the sound that would make them more suspicious than their dirty, not-yet-patched clothes already did.

The stall selling bread was also the best smelling of them all. The spices may have stimulated Teddy’s senses, but bread was comfort, survival. It was the smell of childhood and family. Even when times had been difficult, they’d been able to bake simple breads until that year. Bread took Teddy home.

But the simple bread of home was nothing compared to the variety of loaves at the stall. There were loaves with grains speckling the outside. There was one kind with melted cheese on top. There were even sweet breads like those Teddy had heard that rich people ate.

It made their mouth water, but they weren't there to be greedy. They reached for the plainest-looking loaf, one that sat, forgotten about, right on the corner. The stall’s manager was chatting with another woman as she added loaf after loaf to her basket. Neither of them noticed Teddy take the bread until they’d turned from the stall.

Teddy hurried away, trying to go fast without looking suspicious, but they’d been noticed before they’d even tried to run. In their eagerness, they hadn’t considered that this marketplace had more eyes than just the people manning the stalls.

“Thief!” someone shouted from behind them.

Blood rushed through Teddy’s ears. Without looking over their shoulder, they knew the accusation was directed at them. They took off at a run, but they’d never been the most athletic person. Years of scraping by had made sure that their body would never be as strong as others.

They made it a few blocks before a guard tackled them to the ground.

The bread tumbled from their arms and into the dirt of the path, ensuring that no one but the most desperate would eat it. Teddy’s eyes watered. As the guards lifted them up by their arms, their eyes couldn’t leave that dirty loaf of forgotten bread.

* * *

Teddy groaned as they were pushed into the stone floor. They pushed themselves off the ground with their hands but remained on their knees as the guards held them in place.

They hadn’t expected to be brought to the throne room straight from the market. Everything they’d been told indicated that they’d languish in the dungeon for weeks before being brought before the king. If they made it in front of the king at all. Plenty of prisoners were arrested with enough suspicion that no one could be bothered to hold a trial.

Apparently, Lucius Malfoy was powerful enough to bypass the usual processes. Teddy looked towards the throne through their eyelashes, not daring to anger the man who held their fate in his hands by making direct eye contact. Even without looking directly at him, Teddy saw that King Fudge was less impressive than how his portraits presented him. He was smaller, less overpowering in person. Even his throne dwarfed him.

Lucius Malfoy stood by his side, regal in comparison. Teddy had never seen portraits of the noble man, yet they knew his identity immediately. No one else in the kingdom would have stood at the side of the king with such ease. His posture alone made him more intimidating than Fudge. Teddy wondered if their own noble ancestors, the ones they’d never met, looked just as scary.

“What’s your name, boy?” Fudge snapped.

Despite his angry tone, he didn’t sound any more powerful than the merchants who frequently snapped at Teddy for dwelling around their stalls for too long.

“Teddy Lupin,” they answered in as meek of a voice as they could muster.

They glanced at Malfoy from the corner of their eye, looking for some hint of recognition, but if the man knew of their connection, nothing in his demeanor revealed it. It didn’t matter; Teddy knew that it wouldn’t be enough to grant them mercy.

“Teddy Lupin,” Fudge repeated as if the very name disgusted him.

At the bottom of his dais sat a secretary who scrawled Teddy’s details with dedication, never looking up from his task. Teddy wondered how someone got that job; it appeared far better than anything they’d done in their life. Not that they possessed the skill of writing.

Fudge glared down at them as he continued speaking.

“You stole a loaf of bread from Mr Malfoy’s market. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” Teddy replied shortly.

There was no use lying. There had been too many witnesses, and even if they had been innocent, Lucius Malfoy’s word was worth more than a crowd of people like Teddy.

“Why?” Fudge asked, inspecting his nails in an indication of how much he cared about the answer.

Teddy clenched their jaw. Did it need to be explained? Wasn’t there but one reason people stole food?

“My family is hungry, Your Majesty. I was hoping the bread would keep us from starving.”

Fudge waved a dismissive hand and shared an amused look with Malfoy. Teddy hated the way Malfoy’s lip curled, and they knew they were lucky, in that moment, that the guards were keeping them held down. If not, they might have done something they’d have regretted later.

“If you’re worried about hunger,” Fudge said in the same bored tone, “the kingdom offers assistance. If you’d bothered to attend school, you’d have learned about the program. No one needs to resort to stealing in this kingdom.”

Teddy’s hands tightened over their knees. It was better than the fists they wanted to form, which would be interpreted as threatening by the guards above him.

“Your Majesty, my family receives assistance, but it isn’t enough—”

Fudge scoffed, effectively silencing Teddy’s explanation. He waved another dismissive hand through the air as if swatting away a fly.

“The kingdom can only do so much,” he said. “If your family is incapable of properly rationing portions, then what do you expect from the crown? I cannot control every miniscule second of my citizens’ lives. I’m not a tyrant, boy!”

Teddy had heard that argument before, but they’d never known it to come straight from the crown. They hadn’t thought the government could be that stupid and had believed, instead, that they were just that cruel and unfeeling. Looking at Fudge dwarfed on his throne, though, Teddy believed that the monarch was speaking the truth, as far as he could see it. It only made Teddy angrier.

“Well spoken, Your Majesty,” Lucius Malfoy said with a small incline of his head in Fudge’s direction. “It truly is a shame that so many in the kingdom don’t understand good money management. Now, I know it’s not my place, but if you were to ask for my recommendation, a lifetime of imprisonment seems like a suitable punishment.”

“A lifetime?” Fudge repeated, surprised for the first time. His wide eyes travelled between Teddy and Lucius. “We don’t usually give a lifetime sentence for a loaf of bread. I was thinking a year at most. Maybe a fine of some sort on top of it.”

Lucius glanced at Teddy, clearly annoyed that his suggestion hadn’t been easily taken in front of someone of low birth.

“This isn’t your typical low life criminal,” Lucius said calmly. “He has admitted that there are chronic problems at home, and he hasn’t shown the slightest bit of remorse for his crimes. There’s no easy way to fix bad finances, and if he’s stolen once, he’ll only do it again. Better to keep him off our streets.”

Fudge looked at Teddy with a new spark in his eyes.

“Yes,” he muttered, nodding along with Malfoy’s words. “Yes, you’re right as always, Lucius. I can’t let myself become soft at my age. Teddy Lupin, you are sentenced to a lifetime in prison.”

Fudge’s giggle of amusement was nothing compared to the sneer on Lucius Malfoy’s lips as Teddy was led away.

* * *

They were in the jail cell for three days before Victoire arrived. Despite the time she’d had to process the situation, her cheeks were stained with recent tears as she knelt on the opposite side of the bars. Her eyes tracked the guard as he left to stand farther down the hall.

When she finally looked at Teddy, it was with red-rimmed and narrowed eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Teddy said, their voice cracking from disuse.

They coughed. Water was provided in the dungeons, but it was cloudy, and Teddy had avoided drinking much of it.

Victoire laughed at the apology, a dark sound unlike anything they’d heard from her before. It pierced their heart.

“I told you not to steal from Lucius Malfoy!” she snapped. “You know that he confiscated the house of the last person who tried, Teddy. Did you even stop to consider what would happen before you took that stupid loaf of bread?”

“Of course I did! But every other merchant in the city is wary of me now. I couldn’t get close to their stalls, and you were barely able to get out of bed that morning because you were so weak. What was I supposed to do?”

Victoire didn’t have an answer except to shake her head and stare at the floor. Even after years of getting by on as little as possible, she was beautiful. Teddy knew how strong she was. They had since the day they’d met her at just five years old, when she’d stood up to her cousin for laughing at the holes in Teddy’s shirt.

Then the full meaning behind Victoire’s earlier words hit them.

“They haven’t taken the house?” Teddy asked, rising up on their knees and gripping at the bars.

The house was the one piece of wealth that had been left to them by their parents. It wasn’t worth much, but it was better than living on the street. Or Victoire living on the street, as it may have been.

“No,” Victoire said with a snort. “He wasn’t interested in that this time.”

There was something in her answer that didn’t calm Teddy.

“What did he do?” they asked.

Victoire looked up at them slowly.

“You know, when you mentioned that Lucius Malfoy was your relative, I thought you were mistaken. I know your grandmother insisted it was true when she was alive, but I was sure that it had to be a family myth that had been handed down. How could our family be in such poverty if we were related to such wealth?”

Teddy’s gaze narrowed. They’d been sure that Malfoy hadn’t known anything of a connection between them after their encounter in the throne room. Had they been wrong?

“He knows you’re intersex,” Victoire said quietly. “And your mum too. Of course it runs in the family. He threatened to have you turned over to some circus and put on display unless I did what he wanted.”

Teddy’s heart sank. People learning their secret had been their greatest fear their entire life. Victoire remained the only person they’d ever told and the only one, since their grandmother’s death, who called them by their real pronouns.

“What did he make you do?”

Victoire laughed at the question, a few tears leaking from the corners of her eyes.

“He could have done much worse,” she said. “He said something about his wife asking him to have mercy on us. God only knows why. At her request, I’m to move to a small village in the countryside, somewhere where the city dwellers can believe that Malfoy got his great revenge, but he’s promised me freedom once I’m there.”

Teddy’s heart soared. It was the closest thing to good news they could have hoped for in their current circumstances, and they latched onto it with fervor.

“That’s brilliant!” they exclaimed. “You’ll be safe there. The countryside has always seemed nice, and you can grow food there. You won’t be hungry.”

Logically, they knew it wasn’t that simple. Plenty of people went hungry in the countryside. They frequently arrived in the city hoping for better luck, and few found it. But Teddy was sure that Victoire would have more luck than those people. That was the only possibility they could allow themselves to entertain.

Victoire shook her head, tears still dripping down her cheeks.

“Teddy, I can’t come back. Ever. The city will be the one place off limits to me. The city where you have to remain forever.”

Teddy’s smile remained frozen in place in a pathetic attempt to cheer Victoire up. They shook their head and gave an exaggerated shrug as if Victoire had merely told them that their picnic for tomorrow would be cancelled on account of rain.

“You’ll be free,” they said. “That’s the only thing that matters anymore, Victoire. We both knew that I was doomed to being trapped in here the second I was caught. There’s nothing either of us can do about that.”

Victoire’s body shook with silent sobs. She reached through the bars and took Teddy’s hand, running her fingers along the back of it and making their hair stand on end. Teddy longed to pull her closer, but even if the bars hadn’t been between them, the guard dwelled not far down the hall. Teddy refused to give them any sort of a show.

“I’ll miss you,” Teddy said quietly, raising Victoire’s hand to press a kiss to the back of it.

She nodded but couldn’t otherwise speak for fear of breaking down. Teddy understood. They even understood when she ran away without looking back, her sobs breaking free as she went.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [Tumblr](http://madetofly.tumblr.com)!


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